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volatilegx - 4:12 pm on Aug 13, 2002 (gmt 0)
The purpose is to protect the optimized HTML from being stolen. Many cloaking software packages also make it easy to create the optimized HTML. They either use templates to quickly create many optimized pages, or they use randomly generated HTML to automatically generate the pages. To get a good list of cloaking software packages, I recommend visiting ODP at: [dmoz.org...] lloyd: can you provide a link to where you read that about cloaking?
Incywincy has it right... cloaking means serving different content to different viewers of the page. Search engine cloaking usually means keeping a list of IP addresses for search engine spiders. When one of those spiders visits a cloaked web page, the software recognizes it by its IP address and serves it HTML that is optimized to get a good ranking in the search engine. When a human sees the same cloaked page, they get served entirely different HTML.